Thread: The Teleological Mind

All thoughts will cease to exist at the end of time. No record of them will remain. This includes the highest thoughts upon the highest description of God ever described. There is literally no point, no purpose to thinking about God. Plato's cave is a great depiction of how hopeless the human perception is at discerning what is really going on outside.

But then you say (& totally redeem yourself), "We can imagine God. And that is real enough to get us to be humble and continue to improve ...."

We can imagine God and that is enough to punch your ticket and gain entry into the Eternal Realms, if only for a moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSr-VWc_7WQ

Ha! Dumb & Dumber, always a comedy classic.

Those boys needed a dose of Socratic wisdom—in particular, the philosophical aphorism that all we know is we know nothing; it's as true as the 'child being father to the man'. We might come to understand what matter does but we don't know exactly what it is nor do we have a satisfying definition or explanation for it other than energy born out of quantum fluctuations.

Carl Jung was interested in parapsychology and the occult as he grew up in it—his mother and cousin were mediums! He once had an argument with Sigmund Freud because this one publicly dismissed the paranormal. Jung went as far as producing 'paranormal knocks' that scared the hell out of Freud, who was privately fascinated by the unexplained as irony would have it! Another thing that set Freud apart from Jung is that the former had no place in psychology for notions of meaning. Jung was quite the opposite:

'The transcendent function is not something one does oneself; it comes rather from experiencing the conflict of opposites.'~Carl Jung

Perhaps it's no coincidence that Philemon, a character to emerge from Jung's 'active imagination' and depicted in his red book, looks like Freud. After falling out with Freud, Jung underwent a period of mental turmoil. He even slept with a gun under his pillow in case it got so bad that he might need to off himself. But there is a profound wisdom that reminds us to persevere against all odds which is embedded in the following quote:

'I may not know what I can achieve, but I've seen what I can overcome, and I'll never underestimate myself again.'~Scott Stabile

Epistemology speaking, the fact that we can only go by what our minds present us with does not foreclose sound observations and great insights. Such appears to be the case in what Jung states here:

'Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.'~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Jung first met Philemon, a character who carried a bunch of keys, in a dream and took him to be an expression of superior insight—an oneiric guru, as it were, or the manifestation of the Wise Old Man archetype. Thoughts, memories and dreams may arise in human minds but are not necessarily authored by the so-called rational conscious part that feels compelled to analyse everything in order to formulate some kind of coherent map based on what it has thus far experienced. There is, quite clearly, something else that pulls the strings. The psychoanalyst expresses this sentiment in the following quote:

'Philemon was simply a superior knowledge, and he taught me psychological objectivity and the actuality of the soul. He formulated and expressed everything which I had never thought.'~Carl Gustav Jung

I don't know if you've heard of Aion by Carl Jung but Christ is seen as a figure that is so paradoxical and so hard to follow that the concept itself, as chance would have it, manifests only once in time. You cannot see the face of God but if you want to get close to it, you need to take a trip to hell. Aion talks about dimensions in reality made of opposites where the light can be seen to shine brightest when it's surrounded by darkness. Opposites compliment each other and produce a state of harmonious being. The premise of Jung's individuation (self-actualisation) is that we can use our strengths to the best of our ability and corral our weaknesses so that these opposites are integrated to create a transcendent effect. You work towards your maximum potential in a journey of incremental development across time. Make no mistake about this: you will never reach godhood. But in the least, you can improve across time to become a more balanced, virtuous self. In other words, the apotheosis of an individuated self requires work across the ages.

Throughout the Age of Pisces (redolent of the ichthys) our civilisation, which is predicated on Judeo-Christian values, has both flourished and endured some real hardships—this eon is astrologically marked by two fish, the first of which represents Christ (whose birth is placed right at the beginning) and the second denotes the opposite, that is, the Antichrist (presumably coming at the end), heralding the beginning of nihilism, the veneration of godless states run by self-proclaimed supermen, and manifesting the dangers of totalitarianism.

What we hope follows is the integration of both opposites, because one gives dimension to the other, and should take place in the Age of Aquarius, the water-bearer. Part of Aion psychologically appraises the hero archetype, an evaluation that is symbolically emphasised by quaternities and, in particular, the cross, two diagrams of which in chapter 5 of the book represent the dogmatic conception of the Messiah as well as the psychological conception of the Self—where the historical Christ is described in the first as 'unique' and 'unitemporal' but also 'universal' and 'eternal' as the Son of God; and in the second as the union of good and evil as well as the spiritual and chthonic realities (the perfect union of opposites).

This integration of opposites does not strike me as a worthy goal but is more of a natural precipitate that manifests when the scales are finally tipped in favor of Compassion (over Fear). Seeking the integration of opposites sounds like an endless squirrel cage of activity going nowhere. It is not humanly possible to even come close to figuring it out. Compassion is the express train to Eternity.

Trying to figure out the whys and wherefores of this Creation is a fools errand. Teleology is a hifalutin hobby that generally amounts to little more than a giant squirrel cage for the intellectual elites.

When the Lower Consciousness associated with a physical body finally acquiesces and surrenders all to the Holy Spirit then a conscious building of Eternal Being can proceed in meaningful fashion.

When the human self makes effort to improve the intellect that is all well and good, especially in one's youth. When it works to improve wealth, status or connections, etc. it has value for that given lifetime but it is all for naught when the lifetime is ended and it is time to hang it up. This lifetime is put away like an old suit in a closet and almost nothing about it carries over into the next cycle/incarnation. Not the education, not the development of the personality... almost nothing....

The improved ability to surrender to the Holy Spirit and be a source of Compassion is the only timeless, eternal quality that carries over to the next cycle.

It is more of an acknowledgement of opposites and conflicting sub-personalities which enable one on the path to knowing thyself, but for this to take place, a wilful exploration of one's mental content needs to take place whereby unconscious elements are brought to the fore and taken into account. The concept of the Holy Spirit is explored in Aion and it is a necessary and vital component in manifesting Jung's Self archetype. There are other psychologists who would use different terminology and less cryptic language but they convey a similar premise. It is said that Franz was easier to read than Jung and she put it in alchemically analogous terms to convey the psychology, such as the hard elements of the earth containing its beasts, the water and other liquid chemicals that catalyse them and the vapours that are produced. It is curious that alchemists tended to mentally project onto the elements they experimented with as though they had a mind or life of their own.

What does 'holy spirit' signify for you, Labyrinthus?

Holy Spirit = Creator (in the practical sense)

In the beginning there was the Word/Holy Spirit. And the Word was God.

It is best to avoid confusing "mind" with "life". The mind is a created machine that cranks out thoughts like sausages. In general the alchemists confused the Mind with the Eternal. Big mistake.

Brilliant! I'm loving your input. Now we are getting into the nitty-gritty of the divine. But how far can we go? Can we get past the cherubim and seraphim and meet the Big Boss?

The universe could be thought of as God in sunder. The Holy Spirit first comes as a whole, the One, the insubstantial that produces all substances. In the beginning, the word is Logos, which begins to make distinctions and like a mighty sword severs the union between light and darkness. And so it begins ...

In God's Debris by Scott Adams, the wise old man tells a young atheist how he is past the phase of disbelieving, and proffers an intriguing hypothesis about how it all began. In the beginning, there was only God, presumably immortal and eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent and almost omniscient; there was just one question that God didn't have the answer to: If I am all these things and nothing is impossible to Me, what happens if I wish to self-destruct?

So the fearless God pressed the red button on himself, as it were. The moment God set out to answer His paradoxical question was when the Big Bang took place. The entire history of the universe is God answering Himself, having blown Himself to smithereens, undergoing a process of death and rebirth. When the young atheist asks the old man if God is conscious, the latter replies (paraphrasing): 'Yes, He is. He is conscious through me, you and everybody else. And continues to reassemble Himself ...'

In the preface of his interesting philosophical fiction, Adams makes it clear that he doesn't necessarily believe in such worldview, but points out that the hypothesis itself is eerily profound.

What are your thoughts on this?

That is a possibility but I prefer this approach;

Souls are like skin/muscle cells in the Body of God. The default condition is fine & dandy but with a few trips to gym, pounding away at the sand bag, they develop strength and ability on a whole 'nuther level.

So God creates this gym and starts pounding away.

No pain, no gain.

Sucks to be us but apparently it works for God.

[& nope... we can't meet the Boss. The skin cells feel the heartbeat and relish the nourishment of the blood flow but the skin cell will never be a heart cell/brain cell. Though in a way... perhaps by way of imagination one can approach the heart of the divine and maybe participate in a wonderful AWARENESS of wholeness of the entire body... to the degree that it can let go of its attachment to its identity as a skin cell].

Nice anatomical analogy ...

It sounds like everything serves its purpose with effort even though we'll never be as interesting as a brain cell. Still, like all cells, we underwent a primordial, pluripotent form before crucial deviation at the embryonic level.

At a later stage in the development of the whole, we appear to be the animals in the dream chapter of the Book of Enoch, marveling at the humans who represent angels.

The pith of the maxim 'no pain, no gain' is undeniable. It sums up what this is all about nicely.

The idea of the Soul (which is theoretically part of the Eternal Creator) undergoing any sort of "change" is part of no small amount of cognitive dissonance for me at this stage.

If the Soul is an inborn, Eternal, indestructible, unchanging part of the The Eternal Creator, what is the point of this Creation? How does an Eternal Creator existing outside of... and beyond time, space and matter possibly gain anything from Its Space/Time creation?

"Change" implies a before and after ... which is not consistent with Timeless Eternity.

Anyhow...
Most of these philosophers keep speaking of this Creation as part and parcel of the Living God. The Creator is "reassembling" himself and putting the pieces back together after big-banging himself into smithereens. But Creation is really more like God's hair. Completely dead, outside of the living Beingness of ItSelf. It grew out of the Creator but is not a living part of the Creator. The beginning, the middle and the end of this Creation have already happened. We Unrealized Souls are just watching reruns.

I don't think the soul, or 'psyche' (as Jung sometimes put it) is eternal. For Jung, matter and psyche were one and the same. The essence of the world can express both consciousness and unconsciousness. The former has an illuminating quality and the latter contains a lot of information which has the potential to come to the fore. I posted about Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self on DarkestDarkness's thread about all things Carl Jung but I think a particular section of the book is pertinent to the cosmology and cosmogony we are trying to address here so I'll repost it here:

Summerlander posted elsewhere:

In Aion, Jung's Quaternio 'chain' describes the structure and dynamics of the Self as well as our reality. The diagram in the book shows a series of double pyramids attached together by cones that denote the development of the Ego and the world, and the base of each pyramid is a quaternity distinguishing four separate elements. A Gnostic sect known as the Naassenes conceived of an image known as the Moses Quaternio—Moses being the second most important man in Judaism because, although he never achieved the prestige of Christ, he was the next best thing for setting the realistic example of working on his individuation throughout his lifetime—which is also known as the Anthropos Quaternio.

At the top of the pyramid lies the Anthropos or Higher Adam (Jungian Self) and at the bottom of the cone below the quaternity is the Lower Adam or Man (Ego). The edges of the square which represent distinguished elements and go between the Higher and Lower Adams are labelled as follows (with the corresponding Jungian archetypes in brackets): Higher Jethro (Wise Old Man), Higher Moses (Great Father), The Positive Miriam (Anima) and The Wise Zipporah (Great Mother). (These names are derived from the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament.) Before the Ego can become the Self, it has to confront the Moses Quaternio—in other words, the striving towards the Higher Adam by the Lower Adam describes the process of individuation.

The Moses Quaternio is only one of the four in the chain and sits at the very top (immediately above the Shadow Quaternio that begins with the Serpent at the bottom of the cone). Based on the decisions one makes, one can either strive towards God (Self) or the Devil (Serpent) depending on archetypal interaction. The Shadow Quaternio includes the following archetypal opposites: The Lower Jethro, The Negative Miriam, The Ethiopian Woman, and the Carnal Man. According to Jung, the Ego interacts with these archetypes and chooses to integrate their positive or negative contents. Even the Serpent is not necessarily all negative as it possesses its own peculiar wisdom which can catapult one closer to God—Lucifer, after all, means 'light bringer', and darkness bestows dimension to light. Even though the Serpent rules the Shadow, this one contains all the repressed material we need to confront for better or for worse.

The double pyramid at the very bottom of the chain is called the Lapis Quaternio, with the bottom of the cone labelled as Rotundum (prima materia or the chaotic state of being at the beginning of time) and the top is Lapis. The four edges of the middle square are labelled as follows: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. (The tangible forms derived from the intangible source.) The Rotundum coming asunder can be symbolically thought of as the squaring of the circle in alchemy to form the elements to be subsequently united in the Lapis (which is not to be mistaken for the Philosopher's stone). The Lapis encompasses all elements like an ordered seed which marks the bottom of the Paradise Quaternio whose edges in the middle indicate the four rivers that flow from the source in paradise (Aqua Doctrinae): Gihon, Tigris, Pishon, and Euphrates. The water can be thought of as the blood of God which sustains paradise and culminates in the Serpent (the highest possible state in the animal kingdom where the Ego is developed but the lowest in the Shadow kingdom).

As we move up the planes in the chain, a point is reached which is indistinguishable from God and there are no more squares to integrate. As Jung puts it in Aion:

'The four quaternios depicted above are first and foremost an attempt to arrange systematically the almost limitless wealth of symbols in Gnosticism and its continuation, alchemy.'~Carl Jung

Once the Ego reaches the summit of the Quaternio chain, it has nowhere else to go but to go back to the beginning, thus the mouth of the chain turns to its tail to form the Ouroboros—where the Ego, having reached the perfect unity of the Self, disunites to start anew in the void.

'Man's task is ... to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.' ~Carl Jung

I see how this view might contradict your fatalistic stance and Jung wouldn't say this is the be all and end all (in fact, he'd be the first one to say that one must always consider opposing views) but it has been observed that certain symbols, in particular, the Ouroboros, keeps perennially emerging throughout the ages, like it's something deeply embedded in human psychology—like the archetypes.

The absolute origins of this imagery is a mystery. We cannot trace them back in time within the history of humankind and there is a chance that the truths they convey precede thinking brains on a universal/metaphysical level. It may transcend minds and physical realities.

What do you think?

The ouroboros in this context is a good representation of the Wheel of Samsara.

There are no Western Schools that teach a recognition of the giant Step required to realize the Eternal Self beyond the Void. Almost no Eastern Schools do a very good job of teaching it either. Hence almost no one gets it.

Your earlier comment of how the positive and negative charges in the universe perfectly cancel out, comes to mind. The Ouroboros keeps perennially emerging throughout the ages because it is plainly obvious to the casual observer.

Absolutely zero is made in the way of progress in the Eternal realms by exploring the endlessly expanding regions of material knowledge.

The Eternal Soul (as opposed to the psyche/soul/soul-personality/material realm creation outgrowth/space-time creature) grows in its association with this incarnation to the degree that it grows in its ability to source compassion in a manner consistent with the Nature of the Holy Spirit.

I never noticed how the Ouroboros can be representative of the Wheel of Samsara. You are right! And material knowledge can certainly be distinguished from wisdom. I think very few people in the world today understand the Nature of the Holy Spirit. They think they do but always seem to miss the point.

Samsara conveys incessant birth and death, with lifeforms such as ourselves undergoing dukkha, or unsatisfactoriness—which can be exacerbated by desire, attachment and ignorance. 'He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon!' According to Hindu and Buddhist creed, this cycle only comes to an end once individuals reach nirvana, where they transcend the self and realise attachment is futile because reality, as Heraclitus realised, is in perpetual flux. The Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhism is a prescription which urges kindness and compassion over ill will and cruelty, truth over lies, equanimity over craving and aversion (which entails accepting reality as it is by the cultivation of wholesome states through mindfulness) and remembering that actions have consequences.

The Tibetan Buddhist abbot Chogyam Trungpa believed the Wheel represented 'psychological states of mind and physical cosmological realms'—rebirth here refering to the process of emerging from certain experiences a 'different person' or having one's personality altered; akin to the resurrection and ascension of a divine Christ having gone through hell and even having a moment of doubt as expressed in the words, 'Father, why have you forsaken me!'